It took years to fix the Hercules. While the guys working on her were competent, they couldn’t make an important move without consulting me. She was my baby, and in those years I was up to my neck in TWA, RKO, you name it.
Then it happened again.
I’d built this hangar, which is right on Long Beach Harbor, on land that I’d leased from the City of Long Beach. They wanted publicity at the time and I’d brought them a hell of a lot, with that ‘flying lumberyard,’ as they sometimes called it. So they met my demands. One of my principal demands was that nobody have access to that hangar, including city officials. That was written into the contract with the city. They swallowed that, but they didn’t like it.
One day the fire inspector showed up on a routine check and the guys at the hangar wouldn’t let him in. There was a big hullabaloo down at City Hall. They said the contract was illegal because the fire department didn’t have the right to get in to make their routine checks, and that was against whatever laws the city had made back in 1850 or whenever it got started. But I made it stick – I had a good lawyer out there.
After the metals people tried to wreck it, my security was really tight. They tried to get guys in to see the boat on the pretext of writing articles for magazines, but I viewed everyone as a potential saboteur, and I killed every story on it. I didn’t want any attention focused on it, because I knew the more it was played up in the newspapers, the more that Reynolds and Kaiser and Alcoa would panic, and the more efforts they might make to destroy the boat.
Some magazine, for example, was about to do a story on me and the Hercules. However, fortunately for me, the magazine was being sued for libel by a movie star I had under contract. We made a deal, sub rosa. The magazine agreed not to print the story, and my actress agreed to drop her libel suit. That kept things quiet for a while until, as I said, they tried it again.
This was in 1953, during the winter. Long Beach Harbor was protected – at least that part of Long Beach Harbor where my hangar was – by a dike, a cofferdam. And one day some barge came haring down, supposedly out of control, and broke through this cofferdam. Thousands of tons of crap, water, mud, garbage, poured right through, smashed the hangar, and smashed the Hercules. The tail, which we had managed to put into shape after the sabotage, was completely crushed. The wings were bent. The ailerons, the hull, the stabilizers – everything was crushed.
After an accident like that, did you think of abandoning the project?
Never. All I thought of at the time was: I’m not going to give in, they’re not going to get me. I wept. I don’t mean inside. I sat down in my car and I cried like a baby. Two business ventures have meant a great deal to me in my lifetime. One was the Hercules and the other was Trans World Airlines, which I always thought of privately as Hughes Transoceanic Airlines. Because I made it, I built it.
I dried my eyes with a Kleenex, left the car and went to see Noah. That’s when he showed his true colors. That son of a bitch looked across the table from me, cool as ice, and he said, ‘Howard, your problems are solved. You can junk that plane now and nobody will criticize you.’
‘Noah,’ I said, ‘you’re a small, mean, opportunistic worm, with no sensitivity and no understanding of what makes a man tick. If it’s the last thing I do in this world, that plane will be fixed. And it will fly again.’
Now I want to tell you something that I may not even have admitted to myself at the time. Deep down inside, in the depths of my heart, when I saw how the Hercules had been crushed by this avalanche, I thought, well, that’s fate – I wasn’t meant to complete this project. It was a dream, and it’s come to an end. No man can be successful in everything he tries. It passed through my mind that I would be wasting my money and my energies and my time, except that as a research project it could still have validity. But I saw jets coming and I doubted whether we’d ever put jet engines on the Hercules.
Noah Dietrich’s remarks changed that. Maybe it was just to spite Noah Dietrich that I went on.
In dollars the damage would have cost a million to fix. But it was not a question of the money. It was a question of the time, and of the blood that I and my people had poured into that ship.
The first thing I did was sue the city for $12 million. The barge didn’t belong to the city, but it was the city’s responsibility to keep barges away from that cofferdam. The barge company didn’t have a dime. Suing them would have made no sense at all.
I won the suit. Took me years, but I settled for half a million dollars.
Then you didn’t come out too well.
That’s the usual ratio. I didn’t expect to get the $12 million. I just wanted to let them know that I wasn’t going to take this lying down, and any future incidents would be dealt with severely. But then I almost got into trouble. The city was pissed off about the lawsuit. They sent a letter to me that said, ‘Mr. Hughes: your lease, when it expires, will not be renewed.’
That’s dirty pool. My suit was a legitimate one and they were threatening, illegitimately, to boot me out of there.
But I knew how to handle these kinds of situations. That’s something I learned from my father. I can fight as dirty as the next man if I’m being unjustly persecuted. I know when to be the lion. I sharpened my claws.
I have to give you a little historical picture of Long Beach. It’s the third largest city in California, and Long Beach Harbor has what’s called an oil pool, tideland oil, under its harbor, worth at that time about several hundred million dollars. The City of Long Beach wanted it and the state of California wanted it. Just before the time that the cofferdam broke and my hangar got flooded, the city and the state had come to a tentative compromise agreement, which they were fixing up in the state capital, Sacramento.
I had friends in Sacramento on my payroll – well-placed people. I got them on the telephone and I said, ‘Kick Long Beach in the ass.’ In other words, put the pressure on, throw a monkey wrench into the negotiations so that the city thinks that the state is going to get all the tideland oil.
The city fathers figured they were going to get some hundred million dollars over the years out of this pool of oil under their harbor, but things suddenly ground to a halt in Sacramento. As soon as Long Beach found out who was the guiding brain behind the breakdown in negotiations, they came crawling to me on their hands and knees.
‘Mr. Hughes, we didn’t mean to offend you.’
I said, ‘Well, you did offend me. And you better do something about it.’
They gave me a ten-year lease on the hangar. I called off my dogs in Sacramento and, eventually, as I told you, I settled my suit for half a million dollars.
They also tried to harass me, while all this was going on, by citing me for low flying. The Civil Aeronautics Authority was going to do it on the basis of a complaint by the Long Beach Police.
I was flying a PBY with Glen Odekirk. We’d been using it over Long Beach to check out, among other things, the possibility of that cofferdam breaking again, and they tried to say we were less than fifty feet from the beach. We may have been, and it may have been careless in their eyes, but it didn’t matter – I was able to prove that we were approaching a landing area, in this case the bay, and there was no minimum altitude specified in the city regulations for landings. So they couldn’t get me that way.
You’re probably wondering why, nearly twenty years later, I still keep the Hercules. I’ll explain it to you. Once all this damage had been repaired, the ship became for me, among other things, a laboratory. You told me you flew across the Atlantic on the Jumbo Jet, the Boeing 747. You thought it was great. Do you think that 747 would be in the air if the HK-1 hadn’t flown seventy feet off the ground in 1948? I doubt that very much. When that plane flew, it was of tremendous importance to the aviation industry.